In some well-appointed corner of Paradise, if indeed
Paradise has corners, Francesco Petrarca, a.k.a. Petrarch, may be boggling at
Peter Hughes' cheerfully and engagingly free translations of twenty of his
sonnets. Keeping to the 14-line form and spraying the decasyllabic bullseye
on the metrical target with a certain wayward consistency, Hughes performs
some small miracles of resuscitation and repurposing, ransacking contemporary
culture and landscapes more East Anglian than Southern European for his
workshop materials. His nimbleness sometimes takes him into delightfully
outlandish places - the sonnet beginning 'Orso, e' non furan mai fiumi né
stagni ' ('Orso, there was never a river or a pool', Orso being both the name of an aristocratic host
and the Italian word for 'bear')is
launched with:

Bear Grylls
agrees - just as a waterprooflightweight
two-man tent with integratedmozzie-net
& sewn-in groundsheet is notthe best
location for a bonfire

Though the purist may already be tutting, or even sobbing in a corner with
thumb in mouth, others will find the results of Hughes' freedom of
association consistently thrilling. Petrarch's trademark strings of paradoxes
become downhill slaloms that just brush cliché:

gluttony
cannot be cured with cheesecakeor alcoholism
with Guinnessreality will
not prevent dreaminga glimpse of
the facts will not cure love.(from 'Se mai foco per foco non si spense')

Perhaps some of Petrarch's trecento elegance goes missing in the process, but not the notes of feeling
to which Petrarch directed his flow of invention and which, genuine or not,
came to mark the sonnet form.
Suffering and constancy in love - how the two twined together in the DNA of
European poetry! Petrarch's Laura is said to have been married to an ancestor
of the Marquis De Sade...

If you like the sound of this, I understand that more segments of Hughes'
enterprise are to be published by Like This Press and Red Ceilings Press, and
I'll certainly be checking them out. It seems that this could a rich seam for
Hughes for some time to come - after all, there are more than 300 sonnets by
Petrarch just waiting...